There are times within health and social care settings where professionals ask recipients of services to make complex and life altering choices. How these choices are presented by professionals has a profound impact on the experience of those accessing services. These experiences pattern their subsequent understanding of and response to both services and the professionals working within them.

Background: Despite its popularity, evidence of the effectiveness of Psychological First Aid (PFA) is scarce.

Objective: To assess whether PFA, compared to psychoeducation (PsyEd), an attention placebo control, reduces PTSD and depressive symptoms three months post-intervention. 

Symptoms severe enough to constitute a secondary traumatization (ST) can arise from providing eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) treatment. However, little is known about specific risk factors such as a personal trauma history. EMDR therapists (n = 115) filled out a questionnaire battery to test whether the personal trauma history predicts symptom levels over and beyond vicarious exposure and whether vicarious exposure mediates the relationship between primary trauma history and current ST severity.

Our memories for past personally experienced autobiographical events play an important role in therapy, irrespective of presenting issue, diagnoses or therapeutic modality. Here, we summarise evidence for how autobiographical memory abilities can influence our mental health and the relevance of this for the treatment of mental health problems. We then guide the reader through principles and strategies for optimising autobiographical memory within treatment.